Social Media Shut Down Amid Turkish Coup

An attempted coup is underway in Turkey right now. A group within the Turkish military is attempting to seize control of the country in an attempt to restore “constitutional order,” among other things. During all of this, the government reportedly cut off access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The block happened late Friday night and access was apparently restored roughly 90 minutes later. Certain people were able to circumvent the outage via proxies, and the US State Department encouraged those trying to get ahold of family members to use email, text messages, and phone calls.

However, both Twitter and Facebook claimed that the services weren’t cut off. Twitter suspected that the service was intentionally slowed in the country, while Facebook insisted that their systems were working fine. Nevertheless, the services were unreachable in that 90 minute block.

It certainly wouldn’t be surprising if the Turkish government did in fact shut them down, as social media has proven a valuable communication tool in these sorts of situations in the past, namely the coup in Egypt in 2013.

About The Author

Dylan Duarte is a freelance writer who's covered film, television, videogames, and of course tech! He's also an aspiring screenwriter and likes that watching movies is considered "work" because of it. You can follow him on twitter @dylanduarte, but be warned that it's mostly the nonsensical ramblings of a potty-mouth.